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Saturday Food Chain

Michael Olson produced, wrote and/or photographed feature-length news for a variety of media, including the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner newspapers, Skiing and Small Space Gardening magazines,NBC, ABC, Australian Broadcast Commission, and KQED Public Television networks. His production and photography helped win a National Emmy nomination for NBC Magazine with David Brinkley. Olson is the author of MetroFarm, the Ben Franklin Book of the Year Finalist and Executive Producer and Host of the syndicated Saturday Food Chain radiotalk show, which received the Ag/News Show of the Year Award from the California Legislature. He recently authored Tales from a Tin Can, which is the oral-history of a World War II US Navy destroyer that earned a Starred Review from Publishers Weekly.

Business Person

Olson designed, blended and packaged a fertilizer for container-grown house and garden plants; certified and registered the product as a “specialty fertilizer” with the State of California; and sold the product to the national lawn and garden market. Olson has over two decades of broadcast media management and, as General Manager of newstalk radio stations KSCO & KOMY in Santa Cruz, California, has helped hundreds of locally-owned businesses compete against national chains. Olson is currently a partner in the MO MultiMedia Group of Santa Cruz, California.

Food Chain Radio News Food Chain Radio Michael Olson Urban Farming Agriculturalist A GMO STOMACH STUDYWho is telling the truth about the safety of GMOs in our food?

Guest: Howard Vlieger, Crop and Livestock Nutrition Advisor

There have been many studies as to the safety of genetically modified organisms in our food. Some studies say GMO foods are safe, others say they are not safe.

The question of GMO safety has become an industrial War of the Truths, with just about everything you can possibly imagine at stake.

When I first met Howard Vlieger at a Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance conference in Bastrop, Texas, it did not take very long to figure out which truth he represented. Food Chain Radio Michael Olson hosts Howard Vlieger – A GMO STOMACH STUDY: Who is telling the truth about the safety of GMOs in our food?

Food Chain Radio Michael Olson hosts Howard Vlieger – A GMO STOMACH STUDY: Who is telling the truth about the safety of GMOs in our food?

Having met him, and listened to him speak out against GMOs, it did not surprise me when a study he commissioned crossed my desk entitled: “A long-term toxicology study on pigs fed a combined genetically modified (GM) soy and (GM) maize diet.” What did surprise me, however, was what the study claimed about the long-term feeding of GMO foods to pigs. Listen to some of the claims from report’s “Abstract”…

“The GM diet was associated with gastric and uterine differences in pigs.”

“GM-fed pigs had uteri that were 25% heavier than non-GMO fed pigs.”

“GM-fed pigs had a higher-rate of severe stomach inflammation with a rate of 32% of GM-fed pigs compared to 12% for non-GMO-fed pigs.”

“The severe stomach inflammation was worse in GM-fed males compared to non-GM fed males by a factor of 4.0, and GM-fed females compared to non-GM fed females by a factor of 2.2.”

Given the scientific principles upon which this study was designed, and the credentials of those who conducted the study, and the credentials of peers who reviewed the study, it becomes very difficult to dismiss the study as purely partisan. Yet many do.

This from the blog BIOtechNOW: “It (the study) reaches conclusions that are diametrically opposed to the great preponderance of the scientific evidence gathered from hundreds of independent food and feed safety studies that found no difference in between animals fed GMO or non-GMO diets.”

Who is Telling the Truth About the Safety of GMOs in Our Food? -Guest: Howard Vlieger, Crop and Livestock Nutrition Advisor

If you knew the oats contained were GMOs, would you go for the “toasted oat goodness of Cheerios?”

Apparently some would not, because General Mills has announced it will sell a line of Cheerios that “contain no GMOs?”

To date, the food industry has spent upwards of $100 million dollars to convince consumers to defeat GMO labeling laws in California and Washington. In each state, industry has won the battle to defeat GMO labeling.

Though no law has yet passed to force its hand, General Mills has agreed to the labeling of its Cheerios line. This labelling would seem to indicate a decided turn in the war over whether foods containing GMOs should, or should not, be labeled as such. Industry may be winning the battles, but losing the war! This leads us to ask…

According to Jack Kerouac, the Naked Lunch title he suggested for a William Burrough’s novel, “means exactly what the words say: a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of the fork.”

Here’s some naked lunch…

According to the USDA, one in five now receive food stamps from the federal government. What we can all see on the end of this fork is 60 million people who now rely on a government $150 trillion (give or take) in debt for their food.

Here’s more naked lunch…

The number of people on food stamps, and the size of the federal government’s debt, are both rapidly escalating. In fact, the number of people on food stamps (SNAP) has nearly doubled in the last 5 years, while the size of the government’s current account deficit, which does not include its unfunded liabilities, has increased by over 70%. What we can all see at the end of this fork is the simple fact that the numbers cannot continue to grow as they are growing without something giving way.

What will we reap when we sow Cannabis normalica?Guest: Erik Altieri, Communications Director, National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML)

We have not seen “normal” since the United States outlawed the plant genus Cannabis in 1937, and then sealed the deal by talking the world’s other governments into signing the Single Convention Treaty of 1961.

In doing so, the United States made a plant that was thoroughly normal throughout the world into a plant that was not only abnormal, but also illegal, thus leaving the entire world in a state of “reefer madness.”

But wait, that plant the United States made illegal throughout the world is now a legal recreation– at least sort of– in two states, a medicine in 20 states, and was declared to be less-dangerous-than-booze by the former Choom Ganger now President Barack Obama…

No matter how we look at Cannabis, it appears as though the plant is now on its way to becoming normal, in the country that made it abnormal. This very interesting state of affairs leads us to ask…

How should we treat the animals we are to eat?Guest: Dr. Temple Grandin, Professor of Animal Sciences, Colorado State University

This from the book of Genesis:

And God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over the cattle, over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

And so he did, and so here we are, with all this dominion business to manage. Given the videos taken at animal processing facilities, its pretty easy to see we have not been doing a very good job with our dominion management, at least with respect to the animals we eat. What to do?

Dr. Temple Grandin does not read things in the normal sort of way. She is autistic, and comprehends in pictures instead of words. This ability allows her to see animal behavior, decode that behavior, and use that understanding of behavior to modify how we handle the animals we are to eat.

Dr. Grandin’s ability to see and comprehend animal behavior, together with the backing of some very big businesses, has allowed her to change how we treat the animals we are to eat, for the betterment of all concerned. And so we turn to her and ask…

Some of us eat to live. Others live to eat. The rest of us have lost control of eating.

In fact, many people throughout the developed world now suffer from a clinically significant eating disorder at some point in their life. These disorders include anorexia nervosa, binge eating disorder, bulimia nervosa, or disorders not otherwise specified.

Contrary to what some might think, eating disorders are not a fad or lifestyle choice; they are real, complex, and devastating conditions that have very serious consequences for one’s health and productivity. The extent to which we in the developed world suffer from eating disorders leads us to ask…

To what extent do we suffer from eating disorders? Who is most vulnerable to losing control of their eating? How does one address a loved who has an eating disorder? How are eating disorders treated? And…

Out there in the oceans of the world, where the life we will eat sometime in the future, there exists giant patches of decomposing plastic trash that some say are as big as North America.

In truth, these patches, or gyres, are hard to see by the casual observer, or by satellites high in the sky, as they are made up of tiny nodules of decomposing plastic polymers that grow in size as one approaches the center of the spiraling vortex of currents.

Nevertheless, the patches are huge, and cover large extents of the ocean, and so lead us to ask…

To what extent does plastic trash inhabit our oceans?

Does this decomposing plastic trash find its way back into our food chain?

What can be done, if anything, to ameliorate the damage of our plastic trash?